Created: October 26th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
Chris Floyd links to an opinion piece by Sami Ramadani, an Iraqi exile who opposed the U.S. invasion. Ramadani writes about post-surge Iraq in the context of Sunday’s suicide bombing, which at most recent count has killed over 150 people — including an unknown number of children — and injured at least 500:
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Created: October 11th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
In other words, it’s a typical Friedman column. Today, he tells Pres. Obama what he should say in his Oslo acceptance speech. Long story short, he wants Obama to give a GWB speech. Of course, GWB did not win the Nobel Peace Prize. He did not win the Nobel Peace Prize because his “Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?” approach to talking up America pretty much alienated the whole planet. So now Friedman wants Obama to take the very global set of ideas and intentions that moved the Nobel Committee to award him the Peace Prize and throw it back in their faces. If eight years of George W. Bush telling Europeans that black was white, war was peace, occupation was liberation, and aggression was peacekeeping didn’t work, what makes Friedman think it’ll be a winning strategy now?
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Created: June 26th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
White House Watched:
I started my column in January 2004, and one dominant theme quickly emerged: That George W. Bush was truly the proverbial emperor with no clothes. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 terror attacks, the nation, including the media, vested him with abilities he didn’t have and credibility he didn’t deserve. As it happens, it was on the day of my very first column that we also got the first insider look at the Bush White House, via Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty. In it, former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill described a disengaged president “like a blind man in a room full of deaf people”, encircled by “a Praetorian guard,” intently looking for a way to overthrow Saddam Hussein long before 9/11. The ensuing five years and 1,088 columns really just fleshed out that portrait, describing a president who was oblivious, embubbled and untrustworthy.
When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.
And while this wasn’t as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it’s now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is just a small part. Read the rest.
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Created: June 4th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
I thought it was superb — one of his best speeches ever. It had all the usual hallmarks of an Obama speech: soaring language, emphasis on themes of unity, interconnectivity, and mutual respect. It laid out a grand vision for what Obama called “a new beginning,” and identified seven specific “sources of tension” that must be addressed in order to realize that overall vision: violent extremism “in all of its forms,” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how it affects the rest of the Arab world, nuclear weapons, democracy, religious freedom, women’s rights, and economic development.
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From The 20th Century History, Barack Obama, Bush administration, Human Rights, Iran, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Military, Obama Foreign Policy, Oil, Politics, Religion department.
Created: May 22nd, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
Jonathan Landay of McClatchy goes through the long list of lies, distortions, and convenient omissions in Cheney’s “national security” speech yesterday:
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Created: May 13th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
Jake Tapper:
President Obama met with White House counsel Greg Craig and other members of the White House counsel team last week and told them that he had second thoughts about the decision to hand over photographs of detainee abuse to the ACLU, per a judge’s order, and had changed his mind.
The president “believes their release would endanger our troops,” a White House official says, adding that the president “believes that the national security implications of such a release have not been fully presented to the court.”
Wow. Those photographs must be truly, shockingly horrendous if Obama and his advisers are so concerned their release would put U.S. soldiers’ lives in danger and threaten our national security:
A couple of points here: First, it isn’t the photos; it is the acts themselves that put US troops in danger. The abuse is widely known among Iraqis, and those inclined to act don’t need photographic evidence as justification.
Second, the White House has a tough argument to make here. The Second Circuit Court has ruled that the Bush claim of an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act was not meant to be an “all purpose damper on global controversy.” Since a controversy already exists, and photos of abuse from Abu Ghraib have previously been released, the current administration is going to have to argue that the new photos are somehow substantially more controversial.
Makes one want to ask: controversial how?
Exactly.
On the other side of the issue, Neptunus Lex thinks this was a “good call“:
Nothing new would have come of this but propaganda for the enemies of civilization. Apparently, the administration has determined that the increased risk to our troops – something he should care about both personally and politically – outweighs the delicious opportunity to further harrow his increasingly irrelevant predecessor.
I’d call that growing in the job.
I, on the other hand, would call it missing the point. How many times has Barack Obama said, both as president and during the campaign, that the previous administration’s use of harsh enhanced interrogation techniques torture has been one of Al Qaeda’s most effective recruiting tools? It’s the torture that endangers our troops’ lives and makes us less safe, as Gregg Levine wrote in that quote above. It’s the torture that the “enemies of civilization” have been using and will continue to use as propaganda until they know it’s ended and the people responsible are being held accountable. Our “enemies” are not going to see anything when those photos are released that they didn’t already know about, or that, indeed, they haven’t already seen up close and personal. It’s us — the American people — who need to see and fully know what’s been done in our names.
And that “enemies of civilization” concept — what’s that about? Is torture not uncivilized? (Not to mention, illegal.) Is it okay that we perpetrated such unimaginable cruelties against the “enemies of civilization” if we can persuade ourselves that everyone we brutalized was an enemy of civilization? Surely some of them were not uncivilized!
I’ve gotten to know Lex a wee bit as a person, and he’s a decent, smart guy with a cool sense of humor. But on this, he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Created: March 20th, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
A fool speaks:
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Created: February 3rd, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
I’m sorry, but this story from the Inter-Press Service (the what?) stinks like three-day-old fish left out on the counter in the middle of July:
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Created: February 2nd, 2009 | Written By: Kathy
Spencer Ackerman has an important piece at The Washington Independent about Iraqi translators’ fears for their physical safety now that Iraq is taking over political control from the United States. The heart of the problem lies in the fact that insurgents, death squads, and other terrorist groups will now have access to identifying information via the translators’ tax documents, which up until now were submitted to U.S. military officials by the company the U.S. military had hired to provide translators. Now that the U.S. is leaving, that information will have to be given to the new Iraqi government, which is notoriously corrupt:
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From The Iraq department.
Created: January 15th, 2009 | Written By: tas
I’m not because I have my limits on reading this garbage. For this Telegraph op/ed piece titled “History will show that George W Bush was right“, my limit was paragraph #8:
Similarly, the cold light of history will absolve Bush of the worst conspiracy-theory accusation: that he knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. History will show that, in common with the rest of his administration, the British Government, Saddam’s own generals, the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies, and of course SIS and the CIA, everyone assumed that a murderous dictator does not voluntarily destroy the WMD arsenal he has used against his own people. And if he does, he does not then expel the UN weapons inspectorate looking for proof of it, as he did in 1998 and again in 2001.
Hooo boy…
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Created: December 23rd, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
Via Firedoglake, a report from Laura Doty at Oxdown Gazette:
Raed in the Middle reports that al Zaidi’s brother visited him today and told the following to al-Baghdadia:
…Montather told him that he was tortured with electric shock after being stripped naked, and that he was continuously humiliated and tortured throughout the period of detention, and that he had bruises all over his face and body, and that members of the Iraqi security forces disfigured his face through beatings and cigarette burns. Montather also told his brother Uday that confessions were extracted from him by force, and that he would like to bring a lawsuit against everyone who participated in his torture. Montather told Uday that he did what he did for all the Iraqi orphans, widows, children and for all the Iraqi people who where wronged.
Raed wrote to the International Committee of the Red Cross to ask for an independent site visit to al Zaidi to evaluate his health. You can see his letter at his website by clicking on his name at the top of this article. He provided these addresses; I hope you’ll join me in requesting the ICRC’s participation:
Contact Mr Hisham Hassan at iraq.iqs@icrc.org and Ms. Dorothea Krimitsas at dkrimitsas.gva@icrc.org
Raed also posts that al Maliki visited Iraqi journalists today and claims that al Zaidi has revealed that his shoe-throwing was instigated by “a well known murderer who is linked to beheading people.” Hmmm. Think there’s any link between the news of his being tortured and Maliki’s claim? Yeah. Me, too. Please write now.
Cross-posted at JustPeaceNow
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Created: December 18th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
Who says Iraqis don’t have true freedom of speech? They most certainly do — as long as they are willing to be beaten in custody, accept that their family members will be threatened with violent physical retribution, and — most important — publicly apologize for having committed such a “big ugly act” and beg forgiveness for having offended Dear Father Leader.
An Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush has publicly apologised and asked the Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to forgive him, Iraqi officials said today.
Muntazer al-Zaidi said in a letter that his “big ugly act cannot be excused,” said Yasin Majeed, Maliki’s media adviser.
In a plea for clemency, Zaidi added: “I remember in the summer of 2005, I interviewed your excellency and you told me, ‘Come in, this is your house.’ And so I appeal to your fatherly feelings to forgive me.”
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Created: December 16th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
The reports about Muntadar al-Zaidi being brutalized in custody have reached Memeorandum.
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Created: December 16th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
Iraqi authorities told the Iraqi journalists’ union that al-Zaidi was being “treated well,” but his brother says otherwise:
The brother of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at US President George W Bush has said that the reporter has been beaten in custody.
Muntadar al-Zaidi has suffered a broken hand, broken ribs and internal bleeding, as well as an eye injury, his older brother, Dargham, told the BBC.
Mr Zaidi threw his shoes at Mr Bush at a news conference, calling him “a dog”.
The head of Iraq’s journalists’ union told the BBC that officials told him Mr Zaidi was being treated well.
I am heading out for a 9 a.m. appointment, but I will have more on this later.
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From The Iraq department.
Created: December 16th, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
So, I have a question. If the shoe-hurling incident yesterday proves that Iraqis are now free to express anger toward their government Pres. Bush, knowing they will not be tortured or murdered, then why does nobody seem to know what happened to Muntadar al-Zaidi after he was dragged, screaming, from the room where the press conference took place? Where is he right now? What are the charges against him if any? Do his relatives and friends know where he is? I read in one of the news articles that he was being interrogated to find out if he had been paid to throw the shoes and if so who paid him. What does that mean? Is he being abused or mistreated? Is he being beaten? Tortured?
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Created: December 7th, 2008 | Written By: matttbastard
The Washington Post reports today that (forcedly) retired General Eric Shinseki has been tapped by President-elect Obama to lead Veterans Affairs:
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Created: December 1st, 2008 | Written By: Kathy
You know that saying about fighting evil? That if you stare long enough into the abyss, you will find the abyss staring back at you?
Well, I think Uncle Jimbo fell into the abyss, headfirst.
Be sure to read that op-ed he links to. It’s truly stunning, and very important.
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